Abstract

In the last years, there has been increasing interest in service composition. The key idea is that existing distributed services can be selected and combined into suitable workflows of tasks, in order to provide new functionalities or applications. Service composition has the potentiality to revolutionize the classical approaches to data integration and business process integration, reducing development time and effort. Standards and platforms based on service models and supporting service composition have been developed in different frameworks, including web services, grid services, and agent services. AI techniques have been used to support different key aspects of the management of service compositions, including tasks such as their generation, allocation of resources, execution, monitoring and repair. For instance, knowledge representation techniques have been exploited to provide suitable semantic annotations of services; planning has been applied to an automatic generation of the workflows composing the services; scheduling has been applied to resource allocation and workflow optimization; and agent techniques have been applied to support a dynamic adaptation of the workflows. However, many issues remain to be resolved. These include (1) forming precise, clean and general characterizations of service compositions, and identifying the most appropriate ways to formalize the critical steps in their life cycle;(2) determining suitable languages to represent service compositions in all their relevant aspects and finding ways of bridging the gap between service composition languages used in the industry and languages exploited in AI …

Date

August 28, 2006

Authors

Marco Pistore, Jose Luis Ambite, Jim Blythe, Jana Koehler, Sheila McIlraith, Biplav Srivastava

Publisher

workshop